The bus from Szombathely drops me at the bottom of Várkör, and the first thing I hear is bells. Eleven a.m. on the dot. The bells of the Sacred Heart Church, ringing across the rooftops, and everyone around me just keeps walking. For them, it is Tuesday. For me, it is the sound of a town that has been marking the same moment for nearly five hundred years.
I have just come from Őriszentpéter. Two hours west, across the rolling borderland, and the difference is immediate. That place was all forest and silence. This place is stone and bells and a castle the size of a city block. Kőszeg. Population about eleven and a half thousand. The westernmost town in Hungary, sitting right on the edge of the Alps.
The journey was easy. A local bus from Őriszentpéter to the rail junction, then the GYSEV train into Szombathely, then another short ride up here. Total, about an hour and a half. The kind of trip that feels like a commute until you look out the window and see the Kőszeg Hills rising green and steep, with the spire of the castle tower poking out of the trees. That is when it stops being a commute.
I drop my bag at the Benedict Hotel, right in the historical centre. A mid-range three-star, about twenty-nine thousand forints a night, which is maybe eighty dollars. The room looks out over a narrow street of pastel houses, and the receptionist tells me the castle is a five-minute walk. I do not even unpack. I just head straight out.
Jurisics Square is a jewel box. Baroque and Renaissance facades in ochre and cream, every single house protected, the whole square sloping gently down to the castle gate. Hungary ranks Kőszeg fifth among its towns for listed buildings, and you can feel it. There is no modern glass box here. Just layer after layer of history, all of it alive.
The castle itself is a fortress of quiet. Jurisics-vár, built in the thirteenth century, with a late-Gothic corridor and a herb garden that smells of rosemary and mint in the August heat. I wander the courtyard, where the open-air theatre stage still stands from the summer season, and I try to imagine the place in 1532.
That is the story that defines this town. Captain Miklós Jurisics held Kőszeg against Suleiman the Magnificent's army with a garrison of a few hundred men. The Ottomans had already taken Buda and were rolling toward Vienna. Kőszeg stopped them. The siege lasted weeks, and when it ended, the town bells rang in relief. They have rung every day at eleven since.
I climb the Heroes' Gate tower, built in 1932 to mark the four-hundredth anniversary. The balcony gives the classic view: the red-tiled roofs of the old town, the vineyard slopes climbing the hills behind, the green wall of the forest beyond that. In the distance, just a few kilometres away, Austria. I can see the border from here, a thin line of trees running along the ridge.
Down below, on Jurisics Square, I notice something odd. A small table by the wall of a shop, with a stack of onions and a tin box for coins. No cashier. Just an honesty till. Kőszeg is famous for these. Self-service stands where you weigh your veggies and leave the money on trust. In a world of card machines and delivery apps, that feels almost radical.
I stop for lunch at the Kék Huszár Vendéglő, the Blue Hussar, a few streets off the square. The special is beef pörkölt, the Hungarian paprika stew, and it arrives dark and rich, with soft nokedli dumplings soaking up the sauce. About three and a half thousand forints, roughly ten dollars. I eat it on the terrace, watching the slow parade of locals doing their Tuesday errands.
After lunch, I walk the Várkör, the ring street that follows the line of the old moat. It is a full circuit around the town, built up since the seventeenth century, and it takes about half an hour at a lazy pace. Every few steps there is a plaque or a doorway or a courtyard worth a second look. This is not a museum town. People live here. That is what makes it work.
I pass the St. James Church, the one they call the Bloody Church, because of the red frescoes inside. And just a few metres away, the St. Emeric Church, built during a seventeenth-century religious rivalry between the German and Hungarian communities of the town. Two churches, metres apart, telling you everything about how complicated this borderland has always been.
But I am saving the best for later. The hills. Kőszeg is one of the few towns in Hungary where you can step off a baroque square and be on a forest trail in ten minutes. So I head up through the vineyard slopes, past the last houses, onto a path that switchbacks through beech woods. The air changes. Cooler. Thicker. The sound of the town fades, and then it is just my footsteps and the wind in the leaves.
The goal is Írottkő, at 883 metres the highest point in Transdanubia, right on the Austrian border. The trail is steady, not brutal, and after about an hour I break out of the trees into a clearing with a lookout tower. The view is worth every step. To the west, the flatlands of eastern Austria. To the east, the rolling hills of western Hungary. I am standing on the roof of this whole corner of the country.
There is a small hut at the top, and a border marker a few metres away. I cross into Austria just to say I did, then back into Hungary. No fence. No guard. Just a line on a map, and two countries sharing a forest. I sit on a bench and eat the apple I bought from one of those honesty tills, and I think about how different this border feels from the one I crossed at Őriszentpéter. There, the border was the point. Here, it is just part of the scenery.
The descent is quicker, and I am back in the old town by late afternoon. The light has changed, gone golden and long. I stop at the Golden Unicorn Pharmacy Museum for the last hour it is open. One of only three pharmacy museums in the whole country, and it is tucked into a seventeenth-century interior of carved walnut and oak, with glass cases of medieval herb jars and brass scales. The woman at the desk tells me the building used to be an actual working pharmacy until the 1970s. Now it is a time capsule.
I wander out onto the square again, and the evening is rolling in. The cafés are filling up. The Arany Strucc Cukrászda is doing a steady trade in cream cakes. I take a seat at an outdoor table with a coffee, about a thousand forints, and I watch the light leave the rooftops. The castle tower goes from gold to grey to silhouette.
The cost of this place is remarkable. A flat in Kőszeg rents for about a hundred and eighty-five thousand forints a month, which is around five hundred dollars. In Budapest, that would maybe get you a studio in a tower block. Here, it gets you a one-bedroom in a town that feels like a storybook. The prices at restaurants are roughly half of what I paid in the capital. The coffee is two dollars. The beer is under five.
I have dinner at Boszorkánykonyha, the Witch's Kitchen, which sounds more gimmicky than it is. The menu is solid Hungarian comfort food, and the chicken paprikás with sour cream and dumplings costs about six and a half thousand forints. Around nineteen dollars. I sit by the window and watch the last tourists drift back to their hotels. The town settles into its evening quiet.
After dinner, I take one more walk. The Várkör is almost empty now. The streetlights cast pools of yellow on the cobblestones. I stop at the Heroes' Gate again, and I listen. No bells at this hour. Just the sound of a small town breathing. In a few days, the harvest season will begin in earnest, and the streets will fill with wine barrels and the smell of grapes. But tonight, it is just this. A quiet Tuesday at the edge of the Alps.
I have been travelling through Hungary for weeks now, from Budapest to Balaton to the Őrség, and Kőszeg is already one of my favourites. It has everything the big cities have, just in miniature, and it has something they do not. The memory of a moment when a tiny town changed the course of a continent. And it rings that moment into the air every single day at eleven.
Tomorrow, I will follow the Book of the Grape Harvest through the wine cellars of the town, and I might take the short train ride to Burg Lockenhaus just across the border. But tonight, I am done. The hotel bed is soft, the window is open, and the only sound is the occasional dog barking somewhere in the hills. This is the Hungary I came to find. Jó napot, Kőszeg. Good night.
Everything I mentioned, from the castle tickets to the hikes to the wine cellars, is in the episode notes. Check there for the practical side, and let the bells do the rest.